Alternative Left Perspectives on Syria

The responses of most leftists to the Syrian uprising and subsequent war (it’s often forgotten that it started as an uprising — indeed a nonviolent and nonsectarian one) have been deeply disappointing. Disappointing to many Syrian activists, and to many of us on the Left who support the Syrian struggle for dignity and justice, which is now a struggle against both Assad’s killing machine and the jihadi counter-revolutionary forces.

The Left’s responses fall into three main categories:

explicit support for the Assad regime

monochrome opposition to Western intervention, end of discussion (with either implicit or explicit neutrality on the conflict itself)

general silence caused by deep confusion

The first camp, while relatively small, represents a truly hideous, morally obscene and, I would argue, deeply reactionary position – siding with a mass murderer and war criminal who presides over a quasi-fascist police state.

The second camp, which encompasses a majority of peace activists and soi-disant anti-imperialists in the West, represents an (ironically) Eurocentric/US-centric stance (it’s all about the West, not the Syrian people) — a total abandonment of internationalism.

The third camp is at least understandable, given the complexity of the Syrian conflict. The book I co-edited on the subject is titled The Syria Dilemma for a reason. Yet this stance remains disconcerting: silence in the face of what UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon calls “the biggest humanitarian and peace and security crisis facing the world” is a cop-out. Complexity is not a gag order.

There is a fourth camp, however: a small but growing group of progressives who embrace the goals of the Syrian revolution. There are several shades within this camp – it includes Marxists, pacifists, feminists, Third Worldists and leftists of various sorts. Some support the armed struggle in Syria, others do not, standing instead with the nonviolence activists in Syria. But what unites this camp is its solidarity with the Syrian struggle for dignity, justice and self-determination.

The body of writings and arguments this camp has produced directly challenge the dominant narratives on the Left about Syria and offer a critical alternative to it. Here, collected in one place, are some of the key texts of this dissident left camp. Emphasis on some of the key texts – this list is by no means exhaustive. It’s limited to English-language sources. We offer it here as a living resource, one that is expanding on a daily basis. (If you have suggestions for other texts, please post them here.) Here ’tis (in no particular order):

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Author: Danny Postel

I'm a co-editor of PULSE (https://pulsemedia.org/), Assistant Director of the Middle East and North African Studies Program at Northwestern University, author of Reading 'Legitimation Crisis' in Tehran (2006), co-editor of The People Reloaded (2010), The Syria Dilemma (2013), and Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East (2017), and a contributor to a variety of publications.
View all posts by Danny Postel

16 thoughts on “Alternative Left Perspectives on Syria”

Regarding the “Eurocentric/US-centric” stance of the second camp – a camp which includes many soi-disant anti-imperialists – one might note that such a stance, in effectively denying a voice to the Syrian revolution, functions as a form of imperialist discourse.

It is a stance which completely refuses to engage with the demands of the Syrian opposition. The demands of the revolution are not criticized or argued against, rather they are sidelined, pushed aside. In effect they are treated as unworthy of serious engagement or concern, whether, positive or critical.

The important thing to note is precisely that the revolution is not confronted or criticized, it is ignored. The Left criticizes capitalism at great length, it engages with capitalist thought and ideology, but in the case of Syria there is (at least as far as this second group is concerned) no such engagement.

What this indicates is that the demands of the Syrian revolution are being regarded as unworthy to enter into the space of serious political discourse. a discourse which originated in and centres on the West. There are the privileged who belong to this discursive community and there are the outsiders, such as the Syrian opposition, who do not, and whose demands are not to be taken, and indeed, cannot be taken seriously.

But what is this other than the stance of the colonialist towards the demands made by the colonized? The ‘natives’ are not treated as serious interlocutors, their demands are waved aside as little better than wild noises, whatever success they might have at rebelling is largely attributed either to savage and irrational fanaticism, or to foreign interference by a superior power.

These anti-imperialists therefore manifest attitude of a discursive community that views itself as superior, as having the right to impose its (in this case Western Leftist) values everywhere, regardless of the violence entailed.

Should we be surprised by this? Not in the least. Left-wing political thought was born in the era of imperialism, and while it has denounced and rejected the explicit content of imperialist discourse, it is not surprising that it has retained some of the discursive habits and structures of that discourse. And, of course, because it is sure in its own anti-imperialism, it would be the least likely of discourses to examine itself for the retention of patterns of imperialist thought.

So, it may well be that Syria has revealed that it is precisely in the discourse of anti-imperialism that imperialist habits of thought have retained the strongest hold.